A flash point in the evangelical world

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NICK EICHER, HOST: You’re listening to a special weekend edition of The World and Everything in It. I’m Nick Eicher.

Over the past several months, pastor and writer Douglas Wilson has surfaced across a surprising range of media. Not just an in-depth profile on CNN and an interview with Ross Douthat on his New York Times podcast, but also an appearance alongside an ideological foe Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks. The Wall Street Journal has examined his growing influence, and here at WORLD, we devoted a major magazine feature to him in the December issue we published this weekend. The title, “Ambitious Faith,” reported and written by senior writer Emma Freire.

So why the broad attention? And what should Christians make of Wilson, the controversies around him, and the debates he inspires?

In a moment, WORLD contributor Hunter Baker sits down for an extended conversation with Douglas Wilson.

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HUNTER BAKER: I am Hunter Baker, a regular contributor to The World and Everything in It, and Provost of North Greenville University. This is a special weekend edition of the podcast. I’m going to begin by doing my best to channel the spirit of one of my heroes, William F. Buckley, with a Firing Line-style introduction.

My guest today is a man who leads a paradoxical kind of existence, at least in terms of how he is perceived. I say that because within the evangelical world, he is alternately regarded as either an indispensable man or a dangerous one. There is no average of opinion when it comes to this provocative figure.

He is also a serial entrepreneur with serious social impact. Our guest founded, or co-founded, one of America’s first classical Christian schools, a great books college, and a publishing company. He pastors a church, teaches, writes, speaks, and generally provides content by the metric ton for all manner of outlets, including a streaming service connected to his other endeavors.

His writing includes the theological, cultural, political, marital, parenting, fiction, and even the genre of productivity. The number of words he has made available for public consumption numbers in the millions. Of late, he has been interviewed by both CNN and The New York Times. Never one to shrink in the face of mainstream respectability, he offered highly controversial thoughts on topics such as Christian nationalism and household voting.

Is he a prophet or a pugilist? We’ll let you decide. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my guest today, Douglas Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Pastor Wilson, welcome.

WILSON: Thank you so much for the invitation. It’s a joy to be here.

BAKER: So I’ll begin with something I suspect you have not been asked. I saw in your extremely up-to-date Wikipedia entry that you served on an American submarine. What was that like?

WILSON: It was crowded. Two submarines, actually: the USS Tusk, which was an old diesel boat, World War II vintage—was commissioned in ’46—so I was on the Tusk for a year and a half, and I was on the USS Ray, a fast-attack submarine, nuclear boat, for a couple years. So it was—I calculated one time that I think I spent three-quarters of a year submerged, which explains a lot.

BAKER: After I took the ASVAB, I was recruited for similar duty in Pensacola, Florida, and once they told me how long I would be submerged, I declined the invitation. So I salute your patriotism.

WILSON: So I did two and a half months submerged two times.

BAKER: In my intro, I said you founded one of the first American Christian classical schools, by which I mean probably the modern reinvention of the thing. What led you to do that?

WILSON: So when I was in the—this is the short form—when I was in high school, I came across a book, Up From Liberalism by William F. Buckley, and read that book, and he made an immediate conquest of me because he was conservative, he could write really well, and he was having fun. I just really liked what he did.

So I subscribed to National Review, and I got it for many, many years, and when I was in the Navy I got an edition of the magazine that had reprinted Dorothy Sayers’ essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” an address she had given in the ’40s. And I read it at the time and—huh. I was a bachelor, and okay, that’s interesting.

And then when I was out of the Navy and I got married, we started having kids. One day my wife said to me, “Doug, I can’t see handing Becca over to someone we don’t know and saying, ‘Here she is, teach her everything.’” And I knew nothing about Christian education at the time, except that I agreed with that. And so I said hastily, in a new-husband, young-husband kind of way, “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll have a Christian school started by the time Becca hits kindergarten.”

So then the clock was ticking. Again, I knew nothing about Christian education. I just knew that I agreed with what Nancy had said. And as I was talking to different folks and our steering committee sort of started to form, I remembered that article by Dorothy Sayers that I had read in the Navy. And I thought, Okay, well, we don’t know what we’re doing, so why don’t we try this?

We knew that we didn’t want to be a tony prep school where we were just a private school that did what the government schools did, only with an anemic chapel attached. We didn’t want that. And we didn’t want a reactionary fundamentalist academy that was very Christian and very, very American, where Pentecost was assumed to have happened in 1776—we didn’t want to do that.

And so we came up with—I’m not sure how—but we came up with a motto: “A classical and Christ-centered education.” And “Christ-centered” meant the prep-school approach was out, and “classical” meant that the reactionary academy was out.

And I remembered that article and went to the University of Idaho library, looked it up, made copies, circulated it to the steering committee. And Dorothy Sayers even says in the essay, “No one will ever be foolish enough to try what I’m suggesting here.” Well, she was not banking on us.

We tried it, and then the results started to astonish us. It really was amazing. And we had 19 students the first year, then 50 the second year, 90 the third year, and it took off.

And so we spent the first ten years sort of learning the ropes and figuring things out. And so we started in 1981. After about ten years, I was fortunate enough to get the assignment to write the book on education in the Turning Point worldview series edited by Marvin Olasky. So I wrote that book.

And it was a very fine series on worldview thinking—reading literature from a Christian worldview, and going to the movies with a Christian worldview. But when people read the book on going to the movies, when they were done they put the book down and said, “Honey, let’s go to the movies.” But when they put my book down, they said, “Honey, we have to start a school.”

And so we started to get phone calls and letters, and it was sort of overwhelming. We hit the sweet spot of the need that conservative evangelical parents—who were not reactionaries but who wanted to do something in the moment where everything was clearly a problem, the educational system was falling apart—needed.

So we started ACCS, the Association of Classical Christian Schools, and I think there are somewhere north of 400 of them now. So that’s, in a nutshell, how the whole thing started.

BAKER: So it’s interesting—my children attended one of those schools. I didn’t realize it had been one of the ones inspired by the first one that you started, but I found that out subsequently. It’s interesting you say that Sayers said she wouldn’t expect anybody to do that, right? Something like that. That reminds me—you wrote in one of your books about a British friend of yours who maybe couldn’t imagine somebody taking that kind of initiative, right?

WILSON: I was talking to him, and he was complaining big-time about the state of the schools where he was, that just no education options, terrible, horrible every direction you look. And I said, “Well, why don’t you start a school?” And his reaction was, “That is just so American.”

BAKER: Yep. Well, in Tocqueville’s great book about America, Democracy in America, that’s one of the things he identifies about Americans, right? That they don’t wait around for the government necessarily to do something. That there’s much more ability to just sort of start something to address a problem.

Now, I know you’ve been actively publishing since at least the late 1980s. You came to my attention—and probably a lot of other Christians’ attention—when you debated Christopher Hitchens. I remember they made a movie about it called Collision. And Hitchens—probably the most famous atheist of the past century, probably one of the most famous atheists ever, period.

How did that come about, to take the risk of debating somebody so well known, so accomplished, very skilled communicator? And what came of it?

WILSON: Yeah, he was the best of the lot. He was really good. It was really interesting how we got together, and it’s almost as though a higher power was at work.

My son-in-law got his D.Phil. at Oxford, and they had five of our grandchildren over there while he was doing that, and Nancy and I—we felt the pull of the old grandkid draw, and we would go over there at least annually to visit them. And while they were there in Oxford, my daughter and son-in-law made friends with Peter Hitchens and his wife Eve. And so, as it happened, I became friends with Peter first. I met Peter first.

And then shortly after that—like six weeks after that—Christopher released his book God Is Not Great. And to his credit, he sort of issued a challenge. His book-release tour was a challenge to debate anybody or their dog about the existence of God. And that was to his credit, because he could have had a wine-and-cheese soiree in Manhattan and released the book that way. But I think he opened his tour in Arkansas, and he debated all kinds of people—up to Al Sharpton was one of the people he debated—and different conservatives and whatnot.

So he’d thrown out this challenge. Just hit the pause button there: I think that he did that because he was interested in getting to know Christians. And someone in his position was not in a position to start having lunch with the archbishop, because that would excite comment and agitate his fans, and he’d have to explain himself. But this way he got to hang out with a lot of Christians and get to know them, because I think he was intrigued, interested.

So someone here, who was at the time serving as my agent, contacted Christianity Today and said, “Would you host a written debate between Hitchens and Wilson?” And they said, “Sure.” And then we contacted him. He said, “Sure,” because he had thrown out this challenge.

And so we had this written debate back and forth, and it got a good bit of traction online. It got a lot of attention online. And it was subsequently published as a book: Is Christianity Good for the World? And I think that Christopher was sort of dialing it in in the first part of the debate, because I belong to the presuppositional school of apologetics, which is a different kettle of fish, and I think he caught on midway and started to adjust.

Well, when we published the book—Canon Press published the book—we did a tour, a book-release tour, in New York, Philadelphia, and D.C., and a camera crew followed us around doing that. When Collision the movie was released, we had a premiere release. I went to New York City, and Christopher Hitchens came. And then Christopher and I did a Q&A at the end of the movie. And there was an agitated atheist in the back who asked the first question, which was, “What are you, a supreme atheist, Hitchens, doing debating a bozo like that? How did you wind up in this situation?” And my friend, the agent—it was a gent named Aaron Wrench, who’s extraordinarily gifted on this sort of thing—and Christopher said, “Well, there’s this gentleman named Aaron Wrench, and whenever I talk to him, I find myself wanting to do whatever he says.” So that’s how the whole thing came together.

BAKER: So what did you think about Hitchens? I’m always surprised by the accounts of him, because you read about somebody who took the case against Mother Teresa, right? You know, someone who served the wretched of the earth, and you think that you would really hate this guy. And yet there are a lot of these sort of accounts of people who seem to have a kind of an affection or appreciation for him. How did you feel?

WILSON: Yeah, he reminds me very much of H. L. Mencken: a cheery reprobate and very good with words, a gifted wordsmith and that sort of thing. Christopher and I got along famously. We got along just great. He was never rude to me except on stage. On stage that was part of his shtick. That was part of what he did. But off stage we just had a grand time together—talking, sharing meals.

I think he did have an affable, cheerful side to him that he was normally in. I’m sure he was a piece of work in other situations, but in my experience, we got along great.

BAKER: Do you think that you ever surprised him in debate or argument? I can remember seeing one clip—and I can’t reconstitute it in my mind—but it seemed as though you said something that caught him by surprise, right? You know, like he had not thought of before?

WILSON: Yeah, that was—I think that was the exchange at King’s College in New York. And he was—one of the things about Christopher, and this is all the New Atheists had this in common, is they were atheistic Puritans. They waxed morally indignant about all kinds of things.

And there was—he was doing something like that, and I said something like, “By what standard? What standard are you using?” And it stopped him. And he said, “Good question.” And I said, “I know.”

BAKER: That was it. You said “I know.” And he seemed really irritated.

WILSON: Yeah. Yeah. But he—so the thing about Christopher, the reason he was so much better than the others, his arguments were not that much better. They were standard-issue atheist arguments. But he was so clever and so winsome on stage and witty that if you could pin him on something or make a point—and he could deflect like nobody’s business. He’d make a joke out of it, and everybody would laugh. And you could say, “I just got you, darn it,” and nobody else thought that.

BAKER: Yeah, plus the British accent adds 10 IQ points.

WILSON: Oh, always. Yeah.

BAKER: So I want to transition to talking about Abraham Kuyper a little bit. I wonder if, for you, Abraham Kuyper has ever been a model. So I look at him, and I see this similar pattern of the pastorate, founding schools and publications, writing and speaking at a prodigious clip, engaged in about as many areas of cultural endeavor as possible. The only part that is missing is the founding of a political party and service in public office.

Does greater involvement in retail politics hold any interest for you?

WILSON: Yeah, for me personally it holds zero interest. Like zero. Maybe I could even go into negative numbers. You know—no. And my standing joke is, if I were president—and what a glorious three days that would be.

BAKER: That’s good.

WILSON: So, I do believe it’s fair to say that I am a thoroughgoing Kuyperian, and probably got that from Francis Schaeffer. And there was a period before I was Reformed where I was reading all the Reconstructionists, because they were trying to apply the Bible to everything. And I liked that, but I was sort of biased against Calvinism, and I didn’t like that. And then Francis Schaeffer was my gateway drug into all of that.

So early on I read Lectures on Calvinism by Kuyper. Really loved that book. But it wasn’t until years later that I started to read a number of Kuyper’s other works. So I’ve read a good bit of Kuyper, but initially, when we were starting everything up, it was simply a Kuyperian sort of lake we were swimming in. And then Kuyper proper was just Lectures on Calvinism.

BAKER: And I have to say that I’ve heard that phrase—Schaeffer and gateway drug—so many times. I mean, there are so many people who would describe Schaeffer’s work as kind of a gateway drug for them to begin thinking about lots of different things in Christian terms.

Returning to Kuyper. So his political party was the ARP, the Anti-Revolutionary Party, right? Which begs the question: what revolution?

WILSON: There’s only one.

BAKER: And the answer is the French, the French Revolution. Well, that’s true. The French Revolution is kind of the revolution, right?

But it seems to me that you seem to be reacting to a revolution as well.

WILSON: That’s correct.

BAKER: What revolution is that?

WILSON: Same one. So—same one. The French Revolution is the granddaddy of all of our modern ills. And the nineteenth century was the century of revolutions, and it was bracketed by the French Revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution in the first part of the twentieth. And then everything in between was sort of a monkey house of revolutionary thought, foment. All the permanent things were being challenged, torn down, reinterpreted, and so forth.

So, yes. If there were an Anti-Revolutionary Party today, I would be in it.

BAKER: Well, it occurs to me—as I look at so much of what you write, and I agree with the way you’ve cast this narrative about the French Revolution, these other revolutions—it also seems like you’re reacting to the 1960s. The sexual revolution and the things that track with it regarding divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage, androgyny, that kind of stuff. All of it.

WILSON: I’m against everything.

BAKER: You’re kind of the anti–Marlon Brando, right? In his original motorcycle movie, they ask him what he’s rebelling against, and he says, “What have you got?”

So—you are one of the biggest flash points in the American evangelical world. At my university, I am confident I could find people who applaud you vigorously and others who think you are a kind of conflict entrepreneur, a bomb waiting to go off. I’m pretty sure I could find the same thing at my church. And yet both places are conservative Christian organizations where people agree on almost all of the big things.

How do you account for that difference in the way you’re received?

WILSON: Yeah, I think that there are multiple explanations for that. One of them is that people have read something—“You know, this guy’s dangerous”—and there are different things that have been thrown, like doctrinal problems and the whole FV controversy, or the handling of certain pastoral snarl cases which have been blasted all over the internet. And so there are good people who have read that account—various accounts—and have forgotten Proverbs 18:17, that there’s probably another side to this. And they just have picked up that “that’s not good, that’s not healthy, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

That’s one cause.

Another cause would be people who are big fans of mine who annoy their pastor to death by saying after a sermon, “That’s not what Doug Wilson says.” I’ve heard that one. And so there are good and godly men who wince at the sound of my name because of overzealous friends of mine throwing things I’ve said into good people’s teeth—which they ought not to do.

That’s another reason.

Another reason—I believe that the affliction of the modern evangelical/Reformed world is that we are allergic to application. Because as soon as you get to application, people start worrying about “you’re binding people’s consciences,” or “that’s going to come across as legalistic,” or “that’s not going to fly in my church, I’ve got seven ladies in the church who teach in the government schools,” and there are all sorts of political repercussions that would happen.

So if I gave any kind of credence to what Wilson’s saying, I know that I’m going to be in trouble. I know there’s going to be some sort of difficulty. And frankly speaking, as a hardworking pastor, I don’t need any more difficulties. And so I think it’s a let-sleeping-dogs-lie sort of thing.

BAKER: So I’ve heard an interesting kind of explanation—you may have seen this—from Aaron Renn. Aaron Renn kind of argued that maybe you like to take things two or three clicks past the comfortable to scare away the loosely committed and to just sort of attract the bold. Is there anything to that?

WILSON: There’s something to that. And this is, I think, the same point, or something very similar or adjacent to it. I’ve made the point before that you cannot move the Overton window from inside the window. It’s just not possible. It’s like standing in a bucket to carry yourself upstairs. It won’t work.

So in order to challenge the Overton window—which is what I’m dedicated to doing—you’ve got these parameters of acceptable discourse. If you limit yourself to acceptable discourse, in challenging those parameters, you’re not really challenging them. You can only challenge these dictates that have been laid down by simply defying them.

You have to step out of the comfort zone in order to say, “Look, I just said the transgressive thing that you claim must never be said. And the sky’s still blue, the birds are still singing, the grass is still green. What’s your problem?”

And one of the things that I think—this is an area where I think we have had a modest amount of success—is in that we’ve moved the Overton window back to the right. It’s certainly back farther to the right than it would have been had nobody challenged.

BAKER: It’s sort of the vibe shift that we’ve been talking about.

Very much so. I’m going to sound like I’m going to push a little bit here. I’m one of your Baptist people here, and you’ll be relieved I’m not going to talk about Anglicans horsewhipping Baptists.

WILSON: Okay, good.

BAKER: I’m going to take a different tack, because I’d be on your side on that one. You can team up on the Anglican. In fact, I just read Frequently Shouted Questions About Christian Nationalism. Okay, so I am ready.

So—I have a tremendous interest in Christian nationalism. When it first came out—of course, you published it through Canon Press—and when it first came out, Stephen Wolfe’s book, I remember taking it with me to the airport, and I felt like I was carrying pornography. I was worried about everybody who saw me holding that book on the airplane and waiting for the airplane.

But I did read it. Was tremendously interested in it. My area of scholarly endeavor is church and state. So there’s an element to which it’s kind of crack cocaine.

WILSON: The gateway drug to all of this was The End of Secularism.

BAKER: Oh, thank you. I’m going to try not to be won over as I press my case a little bit here. All right?

WILSON: And so I read that, and then I turned to a life of crime.

BAKER: I remember your very kind review of the book, and I recognized many of the things you said as being right in line with my own point of view.

But—so I want to say that book came out, very big impact. I think a lot of people read it. I think a lot of people are still reading it. You know, I teach political thought; a lot of my young students, especially the men, were very avidly reading that book and following. So lots of attention.

And in Baptist world, it created quite a reaction. I immediately was summoned to the flagship seminary. And we—I and other significant people, Andrew Walker and others, John Wilsey, Stephen Wellum—held forth on our view of Christian nationalism, meaning this sort of unification of church and state.

But as I prepared for this interview—and as I mentioned, I read Frequently Shouted Questions, and also listened to some of your more recent interviews—and I see you saying something pretty different from what Wolfe was saying in that book. I mean, when the book was published, you praised it very effusively, and maybe even heralded it as showing the way back.

But I see you now being more explicit about your approval of the idea of the separation of church and state. Am I correct in saying that?

WILSON: I would say yes and no. I think you’re making a good point. The thing you’re pointing at is a denominational difference within the ranks of Christian nationalists.

Canon Press published Stephen’s book. We thought it was an important conversation. We thought we wanted to put it out there. And then the year after, we published my Mere Christendom, which was sort of parallel-ing, amen-ing, and yes, but-ting. And then Frequently Shouted Questions has done the same kind of thing.

I have to make a distinction. I believe that it’d be possible for Christians, in good conscience, to function within an established-church system. I don’t think it’s a good idea, so I’m against it. I think you know this well enough to know that the First Amendment simply prohibits church–state unification at the federal level. The only entity that can violate the First Amendment is Congress. “Congress shall make no law…”

So, when the Union was formed, Massachusetts and Connecticut and New Hampshire all had hard establishments. South Carolina had the soft establishment—“Protestantism is the official religion of this state.” Vermont, when it came into the Union as the fourteenth state, came into the Union with an established state church—hard establishment.

So—I don’t think establishment at the state level is a good idea there either. But I don’t think it’s an unconstitutional idea.

BAKER: I agree with that. Yeah. Right.

WILSON: So, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I would have voted against it. I would have opposed it. Had I been a citizen of one of those states, I would want an informal establishment—soft establishment—where the civil magistrate recognizes that Jesus rose from the dead, and, in the words of the American Westminster Confession of Faith, makes no distinctions between “the churches of our common Lord.” What Francis Schaeffer said: broad Christian consensus.

Now, if Stephen Wolfe had his way—and he’s friendlier to establishment than I am—but I don’t think he believes it’s necessary either. So he would not stay up late at night worrying about, “Oh no, they’re going to establish a church.” I would have more fantods over that than he would.

But he could live with the system that I would like, and I could live with the system that he would like, although I’d be braced for trouble.

Another reason I don’t want an established state church is that that’s the kiss of death for that church. It’s just not a good place for theologians and preachers and pastors to be.

So—I do believe in the separation of church and state. In the founding I believe it was just at the federal level, but I would support that at the state level also.

BAKER: Very helpful. You know, I think that, you know, to some extent you’re speaking the language of prudence, when it comes to this argument, and that is a lot of it for me.

I really think—when I look at England, right? You know, I went to England for the first time in May, and as I looked around in London and went to places like St. Paul’s Cathedral, I felt like—from my perspective, and you feel free to push back on this—I felt like I was looking at the fruit of Christian nationalism. That Christian nationalism kind of ends up giving you this very diffuse sort of everybody-church in which it is hard to imagine a Doug Wilson, or the kind of Doug Wilson projects, right?

You know, I use this language of the comprehensive church over against the regenerate church. And a lot of the stuff that you do seems like regenerate-church type stuff, as opposed to comprehensive, watered-down, everybody-church type stuff.

WILSON: Yeah. I’m an evangelical, son of evangelicals, so I believe that the new birth is absolutely essential. At the same time, I’m a Puritan—Puritan and Presbyterian—so I have no problem with an objective, institutional church that people belong to. And I call them Christians in one sense—just not the kind that goes to heaven.

But here’s the thing—if I could push back a little bit. I’ve been to England a number of times, and been to Scotland, and when I look at that, I do see the fruit of Christian nationalism, or Christendom. But one of the things I think is: man, they had a good run. You can’t build things like that without a robust faith—which isn’t there anymore. Okay? So that part of it, your observation, is true. You’ve got this glorious cathedral with this rainbow flag hanging out front.

But—to push back a tad—if you drive through the American South, you get the same thing. Only everybody’s a Christian in the South until they get their driver’s license. And then after they get their driver’s license, they sow their wild oats for five years, they graduate from college, and now they want to settle down and rededicate their lives and find a sweet Christian girl and have a family. And there’s a punch-your-ticket approach to the Christian faith there as well.

And so when Russell Moore sort of targeted Bible-belt Christianity, he had a point. But my pushback is the same. I would say two cheers for cultural Christianity, right? When you have cultural—Mayberry Christianity—you can produce something like The Andy Griffith Show unironically.

And you say, “Well, that’s not going to get you into heaven.” Yeah, that’s true. That’s not going to get you into heaven. But it does keep away the drag queen story hours. It does keep away the pride parades. It does keep away millions of abortions. There are common-grace blessings that flow out of that.

And it’s the preacher’s job, I think, in a nominally Christian setting—whether it’s the U.K., and you’ve got Bishop Ryle in Liverpool, an Anglican bishop, preaching a hot gospel to keep people stirred up—and then you’ve got people in the American setting doing the same thing. God raises up the A. W. Tozers, and, you know, the people who will really pin your ears back—the Ray Comfort sort of approach, “What do you think you’re doing?” Paul Washer—“What do you think you’re doing?”

And that’s always necessary. Because Chesterton once said that Satan fell by the force of gravity. Once you have anything that works, it’s going to start to settle. You have the flood, and then the sediment goes to the bottom, and it’s the preacher’s job to do something about that.

BAKER: I wonder how much—as I read you, and I’ve read your fiction as well as a lot of your nonfiction—I wonder how much a lot of this perception is informed by our view of the future. So, for example, you will make these references to sort of a kingdom-building project over the next 500 years.

Whereas—and I’m not a theologian, I’m a political-science guy—but I’ve always sort of had that, I don’t know, popular-evangelical idea of decline, decline, decline, rapture. Right?

WILSON: I mean, it’s all gonna burn, man.

BAKER: So it seems to me like your view of maybe eschatology and/or the future informs what you are willing to try now.

WILSON: That is on the nose. That’s very true. I’m a postmillennialist, and exuberantly so. And that was actually the first paradigm shift that I went through. I was a conservative, baptistic, Arminian evangelical, and in the mid-’80s I became postmill.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I became postmill—making me an Arminian, baptistic postmillennialist. And that’s pretty lonesome, I can tell you. Nobody in that camp. And so the postmillennialism was just simply exhilarating.

And it’s hard for me to put it into words, but it transformed everything. Oh—1 Corinthians 15:58: “Your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” And it’s not just that God is going to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” which every perspective holds in the last day. But your work can make a dent now. It can transform things now. It can rescue lives now and make a difference now.

So yes. Very, very much so.

The one thing I would throw in here is—just aside from the theology of the thing—there’s a great book by Arthur Herman called The Idea of Decline in Western History (or Western Civilization, I forget the exact subtitle). But he shows that “things are falling apart” is a paradigm. It’s a system of interpretation. And it’s quite a striking book. He’s the same guy who wrote How the Scots Invented the Modern World. It’s a great book.

BAKER: So I think I’ll try to wrap us up with maybe one more question relating to the novels.

First, I want to say Evangellyfish is one of the funnier books that I’ve ever read. Flags Out Front—kind of almost a sweet romance. And then Ride Sally Ride—kind of near-term science fiction.

But there’s one thing that I see, I think probably in all three books, and that is a view of how older men should interact with younger men. When I say that, does that trigger anything?

WILSON: Yeah, I think that’s true. Yeah, I think that it’s true. I had a wonderful father and a wonderful relationship with my father, and it is—basically C. S. Lewis says somewhere that it was George MacDonald that taught him to see fatherhood at the center of everything. When you come to Christ, Jesus says, “No man comes to the Father but by me.” When he teaches us to pray, he teaches us to pray to the Father.

And so one of the things that fathers must do is: if fathers and grandfathers don’t teach boys how to be fathers, they won’t know. And you see the wreckage of them not knowing all around us.

When you teach a boy to stand up straight, when you teach him that you have to be responsible, and you have to treat your mother right because you have to learn how to treat all women right—it’s a civilization-saving sort of thing.

And I remember vividly at the bus stop when I was a kid. I was at the bus stop going to school, and there was a kid in the neighborhood—I was pretty young—but this kid at the bus stop was bragging about all the brothers and sisters he probably had across the South Pacific because of all the women his father had been with during the war.

So this kid was popping off about all the brothers and sisters he didn’t know because of his father’s immorality. And I remember my reaction, because of my relationship with my dad. It was: how could you get your mind around the idea of having a son that you never saw? A daughter that you never saw? It just turned my stomach.

And so consequently, I think you can’t come to young men today with a negative vision only—saying, “Knock off the porn, knock off the video games.” It’s true, you need to knock those things off. But what actually has to be modeled for them is a positive vision of what fathers are for. And “you can be one of those. You can stand up straight. You can find a girl, you can marry her, you can have children that you take to church and that you read to,” and all this.

And many people think that that kind of message is radically off-putting, but I would just point to Charlie Kirk. That was one of the reasons why his message was resonating, because what we are doing is starving young men of any chance to mean something. And the way God has designed us, he wants boys to grow into men so they can become fathers. He wants girls to grow into women so they can become mothers, and under him, find purpose and meaning and direction in their lives.

And if we try to, you know, say, “Oh, that might interfere with your career plans,” we are rebelling against God’s design.

And so all the family books are aimed at that. And in the fiction, there is the same sort of thing. I want men who are being men.

I do have one confession though. In Evangellyfish, there’s an older pastor, John Mitchell, a Reformed Baptist pastor. He’s the good guy in the novel. The first draft of the novel, he wasn’t in there. The first draft of the novel, everybody was a skunk. I mean, absolutely everybody in the novel was a skunk. And I looked at that and said, “Oh, this is too dark. The reader needs to breathe.”

But the air that you need to breathe is that of a wholesome, right-side-up kind of person. So the older father John Mitchell in Evangellyfish; Pastor Tom Collins in Flags Out Front is a stand-up guy; and then Smith, the young buckaroo in that story, is a handful, but he’s a very masculine handful, and you know what direction he’s going. And then in Ride Sally Ride, you’ve got the older men mentoring Asa, the younger man—God providing parameters and that sort of thing.

So—yes. Very much so.

BAKER: One of the things I wonder about those interactions in the novels is that—you were talking about fathers and sons, but it seems to me that in the novels, there are these moments where an older man who is not necessarily the father gets a sense that there’s an opportunity to intervene, to make a difference.

Am I right about that? That there’s that kind of dynamic going on—that you’re not just calling to fathers but maybe to men who could exercise a fatherly influence on a young man?

WILSON: Yes, I think that’d be fair to say. And sometimes there are some older characters who are fathers who are sort of burning daylight. They’re wasting time. They’re not going down the right road.

Like Asa Helton’s father in Ride Sally Ride—he’s just going down the wrong road. And he has a moment of repentance. He can make a difference by repenting, by turning around, not feeling competitive with Asa.

So yes. Basically—I try not to write moralistic fables where it’s just sort of a glorified Sunday school story. At the same time, your theology, your ethical system—all of that—I’m fond of saying, your theology comes out your fingertips. And whatever it is that’s coming out your fingertips is your theology. And that doesn’t go away just because you’re writing a novel.

BAKER: Well, Pastor Wilson, I want to thank you for being with us today. I really have appreciated this conversation.

WILSON: Happy to do it.

BAKER: Thank you so much.

WILSON: Thank you for having me.

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